After the first blush of modernism in Europe, the post-war art world relocated to America. This is partially due to Abstract Expressionism, and partially due to the exile of artists to the United States during Nazi invasions. However, this narrative isn’t completely fair. While abstraction might have been the critical triumph of the 1940s and 1950s, many artists were still fascinated with the human form, especially in Europe. Two of the most prominent examples were the artists Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon. These two may seem an unlikely pair since one was a Swiss sculptor and another an English painter, but both had intersecting themes, ideas, and practices. The Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland examines this relationship in the stunning exhibition Bacon-Giacometti.
In a show that displays works that rarely travel or are seen by the public, one can see that Bacon and Giacometti used the human form as a way to express their angst and their neurotic nature towards examining the human form and psyche. While both artists rejected the idea of being abstractionists, they certainly took the human figure to strange and new depictions. Giacometti in his mature phases had figures that were attenuated, mottled, and isolated. These works seem to be an expression of twentieth-century life: bleak, lonely, and existential. Giacometti notoriously would have subjects sit for him dozens of times, and would constantly rework his pieces. He was never satisfied and was restless, both in art and life.
Francis Bacon took another approach to reach the same result. Rather than the quiet, lonely figures of Giacometti, Bacon painted brash, unprimed canvases that were almost always portraits or triptychs, and figures were thick, twisted, and practically shorn of their features and skin. Throughout his career, Bacon painted popes, racks of meat, portraits of friends, and gay sex. These paintings still contain a level of disturbing violence, which (like Giacometti) depicts a time where existence is defined by disillusionment. Life is not happy, utopian, or peaceful. In fact, according to Bacon, life always seems to be fraught with sex, violence, and obsession.
The Fondation Beyeler’s galleries showcase some of the most memorable works from both Giacometti and Bacon. It is wonderful that the museum made the effort to reconstruct the studios of each artist in the form of installations. The tiny and cluttered studios of these two artists show that art was a practice of accumulation and reuse. Although Bacon and Giacometti only met in the early 1960s, they both appreciated the other’s work, along with their mutual lack of pretension and shunning of norms. Had Giacometti not succumbed to heart disease and bronchitis in 1966, one can only imagine what sort of friendship could have developed between the two.
